A small British startup called Fluidstack got its start back in 2017 helping gamers make some beer money renting GPUs to AI researchers. Until July, it had never disclosed raising any funding, and its founders had given few interviews. But despite its low profile, Fluidstack appears to have landed a role as the proving ground for Google’s ambitious plans to build out its AI chip business into an enterprise that could rival Nvidia.

Google has used its own chips, called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), for more than a decade to power everything from self-driving cars to the machine learning systems behind YouTube and search. For years, it’s offered them through its Google Cloud business, where other enterprises can rent TPU compute. But with demand for chips reaching feverish heights, the $4 trillion (market cap) company’s fastest-growing division is in overdrive, with a $514 billion demand backlog.

Now, Google has also started to sell TPUs directly to other companies, making them an increasingly viable alternative to Nvidia’s AI chips. In October 2025, Anthropic inked a deal with Google to buy up to 1 million TPUs, slated for building and running the next generation of Claude — the first major sale of TPUs Google has announced.

Google wasn’t just selling silicon. It put together an elaborate $200 billion plan to finance the rollout of its TPUs to Anthropic, in which the search giant holds a significant stake. Google enlisted Wall Street giants Blackstone, Apollo and Morgan Stanley and chipmaker Broadcom to help Anthropic buy and deploy the chips, as first reported by the Financial Times.

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Fluidstack is in the middle of these arrangements, helping lock up the excess power of multiple crypto miners in billion-dollar deals backstopped by Google. In November, Anthropic announced it would invest $50 billion in new data centers to be built by Fluidstack — about the cost of a single gigawatt of compute. By building the data centers for Anthropic’s massive 1 million TPU rollout, Fluidstack appears to be the first publicly known operator of TPU data centers outside of Google.

Google confirmed Anthropic is the only publicly named customer using TPUs in its own data centers. Anthropic says it has a diversified approach to its compute strategy, using hardware from Google, Nvidia, AMD and AWS. It is now also building its own custom chip. Fluidstack declined to comment.

Morgan Stanley estimated that Google could rake in $13 billion in chip sales alone next year.

An investment memo shared by one of Fluidstack’s venture capital backers claims that the company is on track to manage up to 1.3 gigawatts of power across more than 10 sites this year. The memo projected Fluidstack’s revenue growing to $660 million in 2026, more than tripling from $200 million last year. By 2030, it aspires to be managing sites with more than 17 gigawatts. That’s more than all of Amazon’s and Microsoft’s current U.S. data center capacity, according to a report from investment bank Jefferies.

With its 1.3 gigawatts on track for this year, Fluidstack could soon outstrip publicly traded neocloud Nebius (market cap: $57.4 billion), which said it planned to have 1 gigawatt of AI data centers live in 2026. Its rival CoreWeave........

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